BINGO[B] - Finally got Synaptic etc working. I followed the advice of doing a hard install and that seemed to do the trick. Just could not get it working with the Frugal install and suspect as suggested that it is an insuffuicient RAM problem - my measly 32M.

I do have a question about the Synaptic install. I was trying to follow the screen as things went by. I noticed Linuz tried to install version 0.5.13 or somthing like that but along the way notified me that it was downgrading to 0.5.4 again something liket that.